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It really isn’t a surprise to any of us who participate in the Occupy Movement, that the many Occupy groups across the nation and the world, would be infiltrated by the powers that be at some point. It was expected, and in many cases prepared for. What is a surprise is the collective of agencies both public and private in the United States and abroad, that feared the Occupy Movement, and worked together in an effort to conduct surveillance of it’s operations and in some cases, attempted to thwart and/or subvert their plans.

Once secret documents reveal the FBI monitored Occupy Wall Street from its earliest days and treated the nonviolent movement as a potential terrorist threat. Internal government records show Occupy was treated as a potential threat when organizing first began in August of 2011.

Counterterrorism agents were used to track Occupy activities, despite the internal acknowledgment that the movement opposed violent tactics. The monitoring expanded across the country as Occupy grew into a national movement, with FBI agents sharing information with businesses, local police agencies and universities. We’re joined by Mara Verheyden-Hilliard of The Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, which obtained the FBI documents through the Freedom of Information Act. “We can see decade after decade with each social justice movement that the FBI conducts itself in the same role over and over again, which is to act really as the secret police of the establishment against the people,” Verheyden-Hilliard says.

A full transcript of the discussion after the jump.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We begin with a look at newly revealed documents that show the FBI monitored the Occupy Wall Street movement from its earliest days last year. Internal government records show Occupy was treated as a potential terrorism threat when organizing first began in August of 2011. Counterterrorism agents were used to track Occupy activities despite the internal acknowledgment that the movement opposed violent tactics. The monitoring expanded across the country as Occupy grew into a national movement, with FBI agents sharing information with businesses, local police agencies and universities. One FBI memo warned that Occupy could prove to be an “outlet” through which activists could exploit “general government dissatisfaction.” Although the documents provide no clear evidence of government infiltration, they do suggest the FBI used information from local law enforcement agencies gathered by someone observing Occupy activists on the ground.

AMY GOODMAN: The heavily redacted FBI records were obtained by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund through a Freedom of Information Act request. We invited the FBI to join us on the program to discuss the latest revelations, but they declined. Instead, spokesperson Paul Bresson issued a written statement saying, quote, “The FBI cautions against drawing conclusions from redacted FOIA documents.” He also said, quote, “It is law enforcement’s duty to use all lawful tools to protect their communities.”

Well, for more, we’re joined by Mara Verheyden-Hilliard. She’s executive director of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, which obtained the documents showing how the FBI monitored Occupy Wall Street, joining us now from Washington, D.C.

Welcome to Democracy Now!, Mara. Tell us what you found. We’ve got time. Tell us what you found in these documents.

MARA VERHEYDEN-HILLIARD: Well, the documents, as you stated, show that the FBI and American intelligence agencies were monitoring and reporting on Occupy Wall Street before the first tent even went up in Zuccotti Park. The documents that we have been able to obtain show the FBI communicating with the New York Stock Exchange in August of 2011 about the upcoming Occupy demonstrations, about plans for the protests. It shows them meeting with or communicating with private businesses. And throughout the materials, there is repeated evidence of the FBI and Department of Homeland Security, American intelligence agencies really working as a private intelligence arm for corporations, for Wall Street, for the banks, for the very entities that people were rising up to protest against.

AMY GOODMAN: Interesting that they came out on Friday before Christmas?

MARA VERHEYDEN-HILLIARD: Well, we certainly thought so. We have been trying to get these documents for more than a year. The Partnership for Civil Justice Fund filed original FOIA demands with federal agencies as well as municipalities and police departments all around the United States, and we did so in the fall of 2011, when there was evidence of a coordinated crackdown on Occupy all around the country. And we wanted to get the documents out to be able to show what the government was doing. And the FBI has stonewalled for a year, and we were finally able to get these documents. They came to us, you know, as you said, the Friday before the holiday weekend. And we wanted to get them out to people right away. We assumed the FBI was expecting that, you know, it would just get buried. And instead, I have to say, it was, you know, great to be able to get these up and have people around the United States be able to see what the FBI is doing.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And Mara, what about the issue of actual infiltrators, either paid or sent in by law enforcement or the FBI into the Occupy groups?

MARA VERHEYDEN-HILLIARD: Well, the documents are heavily redacted. There is a lot of material that, on the pages themselves, we cannot see. And the documents also, in terms of the breadth and scope of the production, we believe that there is a lot more that’s being withheld. Even when you go through the text of the documents, you can see that there’s a lot more in terms of meetings and memos that must exist. And we are filing an appeal to demand and fight for more material to be released.

But even in these heavily redacted documents, you can see the FBI using at least private entities as a proxy force for what appears to be infiltration. There is—there are documents that show the Federal Reserve in Richmond was reporting to the FBI, working with the Capitol Police in Virginia, and reporting and giving updates on planning meetings and discussions within the Occupy movement. That would appear, minimally, that they were sending undercovers, if not infiltrators, into those meetings.

There is another document that shows the FBI meeting with private port security officers in Anchorage, Alaska, in advance of the West Coast port actions. And that document has that private port security person saying that they are going to go attend a planning meeting of the demonstrators, and they’re reporting back to the FBI. They coordinate with the FBI. The FBI says that they will put them in touch with someone from the Anchorage Police Department, that that person should take the police department officer with him, as well.

And so these documents also show the intense coordination both with private businesses, with Wall Street, with the banks, and with state police departments and local police departments around the country.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to go to break and then go specifically to several of the documents you got under the Freedom of Information Act. We’re talking to Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, who is the executive director of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, which got the documents under the Freedom of Information Act, has been trying to get them over the past few years. This is Democracy Now! Back in a minute.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: We go back right now to Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, executive director of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, which released documents showing how the FBI monitored Occupy Wall Street. I want to turn right now to one of the documents. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González. I want to turn to part of a memo dated October 19, 2011, from the FBI’s field office in Jacksonville, Florida. The document is titled, quote, “Domain Program Management Domestic Terrorism.” It shows the FBI was concerned the Occupy movement, quote, “may provide an outlet for a lone offender exploiting the movement for reasons associated with general government dissatisfaction.” In particular, the document cites certain areas of concern in Central Florida where, quote, “some of the highest unemployment rates in Florida continue to exist.” Mara, can you talk about this idea of a lone offender threat?

MARA VERHEYDEN-HILLIARD: I think that that is very much a measure of box checking by the FBI. I don’t believe—and their documents show that they did not believe—that this was a movement that posed a threat of violence. Now, throughout the documents, they’re using their counterterrorism resources and counterterrorism authorities, they are defining the movement as domestic terrorism and potentially criminal in nature. But the fact is, they also throughout the documents say that they know that this is a peaceful movement, that it is organized on a basis of nonviolence. And by that logic, of course, you can investigate everyone in every activity in the United States on the grounds that someone might do something sometime. And, in fact, think about the tea party rallies. The tea party was having rallies all around the United States where their members come carrying weapons—they’re open carrying—including at events where the president of the United States was speaking. But the FBI is turning its attention to this movement.

And when they reference the locations in Florida, I think that’s actually a political analysis, a recognition that this is a movement whose time has come. And whether it’s in hibernation right now, it is based on an organic reality of the economic situation in the United States. And the FBI is referencing the high level of unemployment, the needs that people have, and it’s a recognition, too, of the dynamism and the dynamic nature of the people of the United States, the people all over the world, when they organize and come together. That’s the threat that we believe the FBI and Department of Homeland Security are truly focused on, not a threat of violence.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Mara, I’d like to turn to another document from the FBI’s New York field office that shows FBI personnel met with representatives of the New York Stock Exchange on August 19th, 2011, to discuss the Occupy Wall Street protests that were set for the following month. The memo describes the meeting, saying, quote, “Discussed was the planned anarchist protest titled ‘Occupy Wall Street,’ scheduled for September 17, 2011. The protest appears on anarchist websites and social network pages on the internet.” The memo goes on to say, quote, “Numerous incidents have occurred in the past which show attempts by anarchist groups to disrupt, influence, and or shut down normal business operations of financial districts.” Talk about these meetings between law enforcement and the parties targeted by Occupy Wall Street, Mara.

MARA VERHEYDEN-HILLIARD: Well, again, the documents throughout show that they know that the movement is nonviolent. And the FBI routinely uses reference to anarchists and demonizing anarchists or a political ideology as if it’s an—identical with criminal behavior. And so, they often reference anarchists in these materials and other materials that we’ve gotten over the years in our litigation, even where they know there are not acts of violence. And we also know how frequently the police themselves, you know, mask up and infiltrate demonstrate demonstrations, posing themselves as the anarchists that they’re always saying that they’re worried about.

But those documents again show the FBI working with private industry, with the banks. They’re not bringing evidence of real threats of violence. They’re talking about political uprising. And I think we can be sure that if they had evidence of criminal activity, they wouldn’t have redacted it. They would have been happy to produce that. But they don’t have it. And over and over again, you have the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security basically conducting themselves in a form of police statism in the United States against the people of the United States.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And what about the historical precedent here, the history of the FBI’s involvement in monitoring, surveiling and sometimes disrupting peaceful, dissident activity in the United States?

MARA VERHEYDEN-HILLIARD: Well, exactly. This is just part and parcel of the long history of the FBI. And this is not the first incident, it is not going to be the last, and it’s not the worst, to be honest. We all know that. It’s not—you know, the FBI has a long history — ’50s, ’60s, ’70s — of mass surveillance, of targeting of people based on political ideology, of efforts to disrupt the movements for social justice, for efforts to shut down black liberation movement, the antiwar movement. And in the ’70s, of course, there were these great revelations about the abuses of the FBI, of the CIA, of other security agencies. And there were the Church Committee hearings. There were supposedly protections put in place. But we can see, you know, decade after decade, with each social justice movement, that the FBI conducts itself in the same role over and over again, which is to act really as the secret police of the establishment against the people.

AMY GOODMAN: Mara, a document from October 2011 indicates law enforcement from the Federal Reserve in Richmond, Virginia, was giving the FBI information about Occupy Wall Street. It says the Federal Reserve source contacted the FBI to, quote, “pass on information regarding the movement known as occupy Wall Street.” Interestingly, the memo also notes that Occupy Wall Street, quote, “has been known to be peaceful but demonstrations across the United States show that other groups have joined in such as Day Of Rage and the October 2011 Movement,” it says. The memo describes repeated communications to, quote, “pass on updates of the events and decisions made during the small rallies.” Can you talk about the significance of this document, Mara?

MARA VERHEYDEN-HILLIARD: That document is one of the ones that would indicate the FBI was minimally using private entities or local police departments as proxy forces for infiltration, for undercover operations, to monitor, surveil, collect information. And that document, too, and the series of documents also showed the breadth of the reporting. So you have individuals on the ground with the Federal Reserve Bank, with the state police agencies, apparently monitoring and collecting information on the planning discussions of protests in Richmond, reporting them into the FBI and also reporting them into state fusion centers and to other intelligence and domestic terrorism data centers.

Now, the data warehousing in the United States, the mass collection of data on the people of the United States, is of great concern. And you can see, through these documents, the FBI is collecting a lot of information on completely lawful activities, on the activities of people who are not alleged to have committed criminal acts, are not planning criminal acts, who actually are engaged in cherished, First Amendment-protected activities. And yet, it’s being collected under the imprimatur of domestic terrorism or criminal activity and being entered into these mass databases, which have a huge level of dissemination and access and which are virtually unregulated.

AMY GOODMAN: We want to thank you very much, Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, for joining us, executive director of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, which released the documents showing how the FBI monitored Occupy Wall Street. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report.

Has the FBI found a snitch in the hacker known as Sabu? Did Sabu provide the FBI with information leading to the arrest of alleged LulzSec-related hackers? Forbes reporters Parmy Olson and Andy Greenberg dissect the situation.

Acting on information leaked by the group’s leader, Hector Xavier Mensegu, who went by the codename Sabu and had been working with the federal government for months.

Sabu, a 28-year old unemployed father of two, lived in a Lower East Sidehousing project, which served as the nerve center for a vast network of computer hackers numbering in the thousands and operating around the world. His primary role was to identify weak spots for the hackers to target and then spread that information.

After Sabu was unmasked by the FBIlast June he was forced to leak information to the federal government or face jail time himself, after pleading guilty to charges on August 15.

“They caught him and he was secretly arrested and now works for the FBI,” a source close to Sabu told FoxNews.com. – International Business Times

LulzSec is allegedly responsible for billions of dollars in damage to governments, international banks and corporations through their coordinated cyber-attacks.

We have the capacity errors of judgment and mistakes that everyone does.

We are committed to improving the lives of everyone on this planet by whatever means deemed necessary because if we have to take action to right a wrong, it has gone on entirely too long. If that is the case, the people who should have handled it have ignored it. Those people have much higher budgets and significantly larger resource pools than we do. All we have is each other for good or bad. Some use the Anonymous name to try to “Profit!” off it, some use it for nefarious reasons, and we’ve even seen some use it to try to get laid. Regardless of the reason it is used, we unite under common goals for the common good.

There are projects we are working on that we shall not discus as to do so would influence them negatively and significantly. However, even those of us working for good sometimes make very bad rash ill thought-out decisions.

Such is the case of one anonymous individual. We will leave it at this.

To the CIA: We are sorry your website is down. It was not the intended purpose of #APH actions. However, such event created significant amount of attention to a situation that goes unnoticed far too often.

Six compromised servers containing child pornography are actively DDOSing your web server. We cannot stop this, we have no access to them, because the network link is entirely saturated and we cannot log back in. It will stop 41.6 days after the time it began. Your only choice is to act and have them taken offline, which should have already happened.

Anonymous reveals its latest operation, which may have already taken down its first target in Austin Texas.

For the past decade, the government has tried to take control of our internet ocean. In an effort to stop these acts of injustice, Anonymous has joined collective forces with LulzSec in our newest operation, #Antisec. We are sending our fleet to fight alongside the Lulz boat to reclaim what is rightfully the peoples. We encourage anyone and everyone, to man their vessels and charge their lasers.

We encourage defacement’s of the enemies websites, and use of the word antisec on any and every website or pro censorship group. Any exposed intelligence the enemy decides to withhold from us, should be brought to light. It’s time to show the corrupt governments of the world that they have no right to censor what they do not own.

Anyone and everyone is strongly urged to join our fleet through rough waters in our attempts to restore the tainted internet sea. No matter your skin color, origin, or beliefs, we invite you to join us in our fight against censorship and corrupt governments.

Come aboard or walk the plank.

We are Anonymous.
We are legion.
We do not forgive corrupt governments.
We do not forget censorship injustices.
Expect us!

LeakSource writes…….

The global activist hacking group Anonymous claims to have obtained thousands of credit card numbers and personal information from the high-profile clients of a leading analytical intelligence company, all in the name of charity.

Up to $1 million was reportedly stolen from Stratfor, in Austin, Texas, a leading provider of military, economic and political analysis for clients that include Apple and the U.S. Air Force.

“#AntiSec plundered 200gb of their mails and more booty,” read a tweet by @AnonymousIRC on Saturday.

Anonymous, an online community with no hierarchical organization, had been working with the hacking group Lulzsec on a series of hacking attacks it called Operation Anti-Security, or Operation AntiSec. The operation began in June 2011, with an attack on the Serious Organized Crime Agency, the U.K.’s national law enforcement agency. Since then, attacks have targeted the governments of Brazil, Tunisia and Zimbabwe, NATO, various U.S. law enforcement websites and Fox News.

Anonymous promised that the attack on Stratfor was just the beginning of an assault on a long list of targets.

“#Antisec has enough targets lined up to extend the fun fun fun of #LulzXmas throught the entire next week,” @AnonymousIRC tweeted.

In a statement released today, Anonymous said, “Tomorrow, we will be dropping another enormous dump on our next target: the entire customer database from an online military and law enforcement supply store.”

The group said Stratfor was “clueless … when it comes to database security,” noting that many passwords were merely the company’s name.

Stratfor’s website is currently shut down, with the message, “Site is currently undergoing maintenance.”

The company is participating in an ongoing investigation with law enforcement, including the FBI, Kyle Rhodes, the public relations manager, told ABC News.

Stratfor warned its clients against publicly supporting the company: “It’s come to our attention that our members who are speaking out in support of us on Facebook may be targeted for doing so and are at risk of having sensitive information repeatedly published on other websites.”

Anonymous says the stolen money will be donated to various charities, like a modern-day Robin Hood. Receipts the group posted show donations to the Red Cross and Save the Children Foundation.

Whatever their motivation, Anonymous has proven time and again that their type of activism is almost impossible to counter, will ultimately get their point across, and garner plenty of media attention while doing so. You would think that some of these businesses would be listening by now, but a hard head makes for a soft ass!